Farther
by Soshika
Summary: Directly after being found by Tifa, before the game begins, Cloud attempts to come to grips with something he can't leave behind (songfic, shounen-ai undertones)


**Note**- this is a songfic, based off the song _Farther_ by Third Eye Blind. if you desperately want to hear this song (because it is quite pretty) then you can either e-mail me for it (zack@gongaga.net) or AIM me (korokoro mouse) and i will give you a copy :3 

* * *

_Nothing much matters to me so I don't see...why   
I should hold so tightly to a memory that I can't speak of_

The mud in the Midgar slums splashed against Cloud's boots as he shuffled through the streets. There had been a thick rain the night before, the droplets felt like slime on your skin if you stepped outside into it. There was a joke that if you left your bike out in the rain, it wouldn't rust, but grease up and run twice as good the next day. Cloud had no bike, though, and so there was no joke in the muddy aftermath for him. 

_I...think about it nightly_

He hadn't been sleeping of late...He'd been back as close as he could recall for maybe a month. When Tifa had found him, he was in no condition to speak or work. It had taken him over a week to even regain a semblance of sanity, and now it was fading away slowly again. 

_How you opened up your life for me_

Every time he shut his eyes to lie down, dreams would begin to come unbidden. They weren't really dreams so much as daydreams, burned onto the insides of his eyelids. He hadn't seen Zack die, but he knew what had happened. All the memories from then were foggy, fuzzy, like a party where he'd drank too much. 

_Why are you still lonely?_

The dreams honestly shouldn't have been plagueing him, but he feared that if he actually went to sleep they would turn vicious. So he sat up at nights, staring out an open window. On the street below, he could see the lights on in Final Haven, and knew that he could always have gone down there, and spoken to Tifa... 

_Though I'm not the type who begs   
I'm thinking how you'd open up your legs   
And I'm farther from you every day_

Then, as always, he would turn his head away from the window and stare at the far off wall. The shadows cast up from streetlamps and the bar windows sillouetted on the wall, and helplessly, Cloud would watch them move and imagine. The dark shape, every night, would shift if he squinted. If he reached that platuea between tears and shut eyes, he could see the arched back and scruffy hair of his friend. 

_Alright, yeah   
Farther from you every day   
F-f-farther, alright_

So where he was going now, with a hollow feeling in his chest, was back to the crumbling apartment. Cloud's eyes were cast down, and they felt sick and heavy. Inside, he could feel that all there was to him was this flesh shell, and nothing beneith... 

_And a woman talking to herself   
Gathers up the shit she couldn't sell   
Chances don't bode well tomorrow_

The girl on the corner was there again today, selling the same flowers. Cloud never made eye contact, but always looked on his feet. She spoke to the flowers, like they were going to live forever. In the evening she would take them back to wherever they came from each morning, and set them away like children. Maybe she was a little crazy...but that was alright... 

_And talking to myself pass by_

There was no doubt that he was thinner than he had been when Tifa had found him. His shoulderblades stuck out like stunted stumps where he had maybe once had wings. They, like his entire self, were gone now. More time was devoted to thinking in silence of the had been than what was the present. 

_I miss you but not the face you make_

It was the haunting smile that kept impressing on his eyelids at night. Zack had a look on his face, and through the fog of bad memory, Cloud could always anchor himself to that smile to pull himself through. 

_Like when you found me out for the fake I am_

Before what had happened, Zack had that smile too...but Cloud didn't like to think about then. It meant that he would have to sit and face in the darkness and shadows not only a squinted reality that the shape he talked to in the night was only a shadow. 

_So easily you see through me_

It meant he would have to face the fact that he, despite what Tifa had drawn to conclude for herself, had never made it to Zack's rank. That they had never even made it halfway. He was still a grunt, and a guard, someone who kept their mask on despite feeling sick. 

_What do you do to me to make me treat you so bad?_

And he knew it was wrong. It was wrong to lie, and let Tifa keep thinking he was stronger than he was. She was always saying how when he recovered fully that he would find work without problems thanks to his experience. And he never replied. In fact, he had stopped talking to her altogether. 

_I keep hoping that you'll speak to me   
But I'm farther from you every day_

It was the shadow on the wall he spoke to now, incoherant and feverish into the night. His own voice felt strange coming out, dried leaves in summertime. Cloud couldn't see that when the lights shut down, the shadow faded. It could not cross his mind that when he moved, the shadow would move as well. But the disadvantage to shadows, Cloud had found, was they didn't let you remember the faces. 

_Yeah, oh yeah   
Farther from you every day_

The steel covering the edges of his boots clanked when it stubbed into the concrete stoop before the apartment building. For a moment, Cloud's funk jolted aside but rushed back egarly when he began to fumble for the keys inside. He staggered through the open door, feet scraping on the peeled linolium. For a moment, for a few steps, he tripped and had to regain his balance against the stairwell railing. 

_All I think about is waiting   
And the people we are fading into   
Alright_

It wasn't that Cloud was drinking, or anything of the sort. He was learning softly and on muted volume that a slow starvation and exhaustion had the same effects on a human. Looking down at his hands, he wondered when he had chosen to put on the soiled white shirt covering his arms. Had he even chosen? 

_Farther from you every day_

The stairs melted away when he climbed, his legs fading under him. Had he climbed three flights, had he opened the apartment door? It was bolted now, he could see it from where he sat on the bed, feet bare and flat against the unwaxed wood floor. Sickly, he inhaled a breath that came in feather light and bent forward, hands wrapping around the back of his head. 

_Oh oh oh, there was a sound_

"Cloud, what happened?" 

_But I don't know how it goes_

Cloud looked up in confusion, his vocal chords cracking like crisp leaves. He didn't recognize the waivering dark shape against the far wall for a moment. His eyes squinted, the shadows beneith them aching from overuse. A second was all it took for euphoria to swim through him and wash away, leaving a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach. All at once, it was Zack, and then it melted away into the shadows again. He couldn't speak. 

_There was something we went through   
Blew in from the coast_

There was a splash of crystal clarity across Cloud's foggy brain, crystal clear and thick with blood. There was shouting and the scrape of metal on metal. Hands delved around the back of his skull again and Cloud burried his face against his knees. The world was black to the touch, but full of vision. 

_You are of the earth, I am of the sky_

Zack was dead, and he knew it. Zack was gone, and he might have been sure of that. Zack was a person...maybe he was...The ice gripped Cloud's throat and choked him, he could hear himself wretching from the inside as the sights in the locked corners of his mind grew even more slippery. When he reached for Zack's smile, it was gone... 

_I don't even know what the hell that means_

Gradually, the cold began to move back from the edges of his throat. There was the knowledge that something was missing, but the gloss that it didn't matter. The empty feeling inside persisted, now without a source- Cloud felt sick. Lifting his head up, there was nothing but shadows on the far wall. 

_Farther from you every day_

He was suddenly so tired...Wirey taut arms could suddenly feel the softness of a bed beneith them, but the sensation had never been there before. Cloud was so cold, so tired, his cloths hanging from shoulders like they had been thrown into a dead tree. 

_All I think about is waiting_

Bed against his shoulder now, Cloud could feel the matress pressing into his sides as he breathed. His hips were sticking out, he could notice now, because they pressed farther into the matress than the rest of him. A weight like a lazy cats realxed softly onto his spine- the blonde could not move now. But he didn't want to. He only wanted to finally sleep... 

_And all the people we are fading into   
Farther from you every day_

There was no way for him to know. It was like a mist on glass, after all, to see anything moving through the stale apartment air. Tendrils of the unseen feeling reached and brushed against the battered soldier's eyes, and slowly they relaxed shut. 

_And I think about you dying years from now   
Never having known who you are_

Something was there, however. There was no shape to it, only the last figments left over from Cloud's imagination. He -Zack- could only have survived this far and this long through that intangable maze of memory that Cloud carried. But now he could see, and now he could understand. 

_(This could be my big mistake) Farther from you every day_

To remember him was holding Cloud back, tying him down to the past. It didn't matter, the ghost knew, if Cloud was willing to go quietly into the night from his own self hatred. If it helped Cloud to go on with life, Zack was willing to have never existed at all. 

_All I think about is waiting   
And all the people we are fading into   
Farther from you every day   
And I think about you dying years from now   
Never having known who you are   
Farther from you every day_

After all...There was no life in being a speechless shadow. 

The faintest remenants of the man who had been known as Zack- the man who had died twice so that Cloud could live- those soft remnants closed themselves up, and let themselves fade. 


End file.
